Category Archives: Windows 10

As a #WindowsInsiders, I’m still using a Windows 10 Mobile device. I’m using the Microsoft Lumia 950XL – In many ways a great phone, it is on the fast ring.

My phone is my primary media device for music and audio books. Spotify, Groove and Audible are my three musketeers in mobile entertainment. When using wired headphones everything is rock solid, there are never interruptions in the audio stream, I can do anything at the same time on the phone, playing games, browsing, emails – anything.

But Bluetooth is a whole other universe!

So a naive thought would be that replacing the minijack and audio wire with Bluetooth would give the exact same result, but no. There are so many problems with Bluetooth on Windows 10 Mobile that it’s hard to know where to begin.

So let’s begin with connecting. I use Bluetooth to connect my phone to my cars, note the plural. Due to the way our daily schedule is, I often drive one car to and from work and another car to drive to activities, transport kids, bikes, skies etc.

Quite often (currently around 10 times a week) when entering a car, three things can happen (instead of the phone just working)

The phone will not connect to the car

The phone connects briefly, then reboots

The phone connects for voice but not for music

The solution to this problem can be to disable/enable Bluetooth in the settings app, this will solve the issues 25% of the times. Otherwise, I have to reboot the phone (Hold power – watching “Goodbye” for several minutes) to make the connection.

If I’m lucky enough to get a connection with audio, the “sound quality” issues start. There several different issues here:

If something else is going on, aka. multitasking, even the simplest operation will create skips in the audio stream.

Some operations can switch the audio stream into a “low bandwidth” sounding setting, in lack of a better term, sounding just like when compressing voice through an 8kbit GSM compression

Other operations will cause static noise and stutter.

And the last group of issues, I’ll call “external interference”, driving in certain areas always gives different audio issues – This is hard to describe, but driving on a specific piece of road will ALWAYS interrupt the audio stream, even when running audio from an app like audible where everything is streamed from the device.

Microsoft, how can I help you, so we can fix this? Reporting in Feedback Hub does not seem to have any effect, I’ll also hear from several other people whom all have similar issues.

As a long time Windows Phone user since Windows Phone 7 (HTC 7HD) it’s making me sad, that Windows 10 Phones are getting closer to dying every day.

Everybody who try my current phone, a Lumia 950XL, agrees that its a nice phone. And stuff like continuum and Windows Hello are quite impressive. But the lack of apps continues to be a major issue.

It’s no longer the high profile apps like Instagram or Facebook that’s missing (Apart from Pokemon Go) its the middle layer, the local taxi app, local transportation app, local .. local.. local. Everything I need to interact with my city.

The solution to this is simple: Bring back Project Astoria

Astoria was the cancelled project that would enable android apps to run on Windows 10, a Android subsystem. Rumors has it that it actually worked too well? Could it be a threat to Universal Windows Platform? We got the Linux subsystem with 1607 so we are closer than ever.

Would anything bad happened to UWP if Windows 10 for Phones could run Android Apps? My prediction is no. History has shown that the missing apps are not coming anyway, so by allowing Android apps to run, that would simply make Windows Phone useful for a lot of people.

Would Microsoft loose “face” if they did this? Properly a little, but not as much as they do on a daily basis right now.

I’m not really talking about bringing the complete “Google Apps” suite to Windows Phone, I’m talking about all the 2nd tier apps that makes the world work. Download from Play is properly a requirement, but maybe it could be Amazon AppStore?

One quite nice consequence of adding an Android subsystem to Windows 10 Phone, is the possibility of separating the phone, so the Android part could be “private” while the rest of the phone is “work”.